And I would argue that rigidly deciding that Valve is just going to be about what PC gamers think is cool and refusing to seriously consider other ideas is not good culture. Its close-minded. Adopting a hardware project and then hamstringing efforts to bring it to fruition because of a lack of creativity and unwillingness to compromise is toxic.

Just to be clear srdev, I'm not rigidly defining valve. My original point was rather than assuming people weren't interested based on bonuses, it might just be that a bunch of gamers aren't really interested in tech that hasn't been shown to have any interesting game play metrics.

That'd mean that while it doesn't work to her interests, valve would actually be working as intended, where people work on projects they feel interested and useful in, which is good for everyone who doesn't have a burning desire to make other folks work on their niche project.

That makes more sense than my initial understanding of what you were saying. I would still argue that Valve, as a company, should not have strung her project along if they were not really interested in committing to AR. The problem I see here is that they brought on people to do hardware projects, and then resisted making any compromises that might be required to see the project to completion. Its easy to understand why said employees would be bitter in such a case, and I would say that there should have been some more introspection on whether they were really committed to the project or not. The one-sided story we're getting indicates that the introspection never occurred and it was brushed off as the employee's problem when it really was Valve's.

Edit: That being said, the resolution of the situation was impressive. I think that Gabe handing over the rights to the work she did was a class act, so I definitely don't want to make it seem like Valve is a bad place. Rather, my argument is that this is a potential downside, and it'd be warranted to keep the pitfalls involved with this kind of culture in-mind.